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A TSA officer will lose his or her job over this note

This may be the quickest response ever by the TSA to a privacy concern expressed by a passenger. A TSA spokesman has alerted me that the agency has decided to fire the officer who found a vibrator in a female passenger's checked bag on Saturday night and left her a note, "Get Your Freak On, Girl."

"[The TSA] has initiated action to remove the individual from federal service," says a spokesperson. "Like all federal employees, this individual is entitled to due process and protected by the Privacy Act. During the removal action process, the employee will not perform any screening duties."

Jill Filipovic, the lawyer and Feministe blogger who found and tweeted the not, will not be happy to hear this news. After being told that the officer had been identified and suspended, she blogged that she hoped the person would not be fired.

"It’s easy to scape-goat one individual here, but the problem with the note is that it’s representative of the bigger privacy intrusions that the U.S. government, through the TSA and other sources, levels every day," wrote Filipovic. "The invasion is inherent to the TSA’s mission, regardless of whether a funny note is left behind — the note only serves to highlight the absurdity of all this security theater. As much as this is a funny and titillating story, when I put the note on Twitter for what I thought was a relatively limited audience I was hoping it would open up a bigger conversation about privacy rights (or lack thereof) in post-9/11 America."

As I wrote before, I’m torn on whether this is a fire-able offense. In reaction to 9/11, flying has become an incredibly irritating and invasive exercise. Disrobing. Patdowns. Body scanners. Bags inspected. It's all the new normal. The TSA security process forces both us and the officers to pretend that when they pat us down and go through our bags, they’re just doing a job and that what they're doing is a reasonable invasion of privacy for the sake of security. But to a considerable number of Americans, this is not the case. The "Get Your Freak On" note, in response to a vibrator being mistakenly identified as a potential weapon, though certainly not written with that intent, was a comment on this. The note could alternatively had said, "Wow, ma'am, this is embarrassing, but our screening machines thought there was a weapon in your bag. Turns out it was just a vibrator. This is kind of embarrassing, but I wound up touching your vibrator. That is pretty awkward. Heh. Just wanted to let you know. Sorry about the fact that I'm required to do this. Have fun with it."

The note was the officer remarking on something we're all supposed to pretend doesn't happen -- that the TSA ends up encountering intimate things about us, and that it's embarrassing. This officer did abuse his or her access to the contents of Filipovic's bag to make a joke, or to harass her, but the bigger issue is that we regularly have people going through our bags in the first place.

"The note was inappropriate, the agent in question acted unprofessionally when s/he put in in my bag, there should be consequences and I’m glad the TSA takes these things seriously," wrote Filipovic. "But I get no satisfaction in hearing that someone may be in danger of losing their job over this. I would much prefer a look at why ‘security’ has been used to justify so many intrusions on our civil liberties, rather than fire a person who made a mistake."

While the person will be fired for remarking on the intrusion of privacy that took place, he or she is still entitled to a bit of privacy. The TSA is not revealing the gender or name of the officer, as that would be a violation of the Privacy Act.